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engage users in a meaningful fashion, whether its purpose is utility or entertain-
ment. The most successful applications can take weeks to build and promote
within Facebook, so don’t expect this to be a simple endeavor.

Popular applications include games, quizzes, badges, calculators, and tools that
analyze a person’s social graph, which is a mapping of people and how they relate to
each other. For example, TripAdvisor’s Cities I’ve Visited application lets you show
your friends which cities around the world you’ve visited. It has been an extremely
popular application. For more information on building Facebook applications, visit
the Facebook Developers page (http://developers.facebook.com/).

For a list of the top Facebook applications that can help your business, visit
https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-page-apps/ for guidance.

Login with Facebook

Facebook Connect continued to evolve since its introduction in 2008, and is now
referred to as Login with Facebook. In a nutshell, when you use an application that
allows you to use Login with Facebook, you have the ability to bring your Facebook
social graph to a third-party website or simply use your Facebook credentials to
log in to that website. In this case, the social graph is composed of your Facebook
network. This means that when users log in to those sites with their Facebook
credentials, they can see which of their friends have participated on that website
in some fashion, whether by commenting, rating, or writing a product review.
Whatever the users do is also sent to Facebook and appears in the newsfeeds of all
their friends (if you have given the appropriate permissions). But the newsfeed
has some lag time, whereas users can instantly see what their friends are up to by
looking at the ticker on the right side of the page.

The ticker allows users to share their activity on third-party websites with their
friends in Facebook, which inadvertently gives the site more exposure and greater
power from a recommendation perspective. Figure 8-4 shows the home page.

For more information about Login with Facebook, visit the Facebook Developers
page (http://developers.facebook.com) for general guidelines. Also check out
the Facebook Login page for information on implementing the service (https://
developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/).

CHAPTER 8 Exploring SMM Strategies for Facebook 143